PBBM bats for ‘innovative, sustainable’ manufacturing sector

THE Marcos administration is making the manufacturing sector innovative and sustainable in an effort to entice more foreign investors and make the Philippines a prime investment destination, a Trade official said on Saturday.

During the Saturday News Forum in Quezon City, Lanie Dormiendo, director for the International Investments Promotion Service of the Board of Investments (BOI), said manufacturing is one of the priority sectors that the administration intends to develop.

“We are really aggressively promoting innovative and sustainable manufacturing and services,” Dormiendo said, noting that the government is putting a premium on

“high-value” manufacturing activities such as electric vehicle (EV) assembly, battery manufacturing and mineral processing.

“We want to attract foreign investors to do a higher value activity to do mineral processing, and then attract battery manufacturers and eventually the EV assemblers and EV manufacturers,” she added.

Dormiendo said the country has “a lot of minerals” that can be processed to form part of batteries, not only for EVs but also for battery energy storage systems.

She also said the government wants to capitalize on the country’s available resources instead of exporting them to China and Japan as raw minerals.

In terms of sustainable infrastructure and services, the Marcos administration is “actively” promoting renewable energy (RE), Dormiendo said.

She noted that late last year, the Department of Energy amended the implementing rules and regulation of Republic Act 9513, otherwise known as the Renewable Energy Act of 2008, to allow 100-percent foreign equity for a lot of RE sources including wind, solar and tidal.

She said the government also allows 100-percent foreign equity for geothermal and biomass, a move that encouraged more foreign and local investors to venture into RE.

“In fact, for the BOI- approved projects last year, RE projects accounted for a huge portion of our investment approvals,” she said. “For this year, we already registered more than P400 billion worth of investments and a large chunk of these investment approvals are also into renewable energy.”

Just six weeks into 2023, the total investment projects approved by the BOI already reached P414.3 billion, a 142.9-percent increase compared to the P170.5 billion recorded in the same period last year, according to data released on Saturday.

The RE or power sector remains dominant with P398.7 billion in approvals to date, up by 138 percent from P167.9 billion registered last year.

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